Holiday `Gift'

OPINION - Reader Views

January 12, 2004

It appears as if an ironic sense of holiday spirit is alive and well in the Bush administration. With a Christmas Eve announcement, it gave the timber industry a gift of enormous proportions by revoking protections on our nation's largest national forest. The gift: the best and biggest wild areas in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska -- a national treasure and the world's largest remaining coastal temperate rainforest.

Shamefully, this "gift" was given despite the public's overwhelming support for conserving wild areas in the Alaskan rainforest. And the price tag -- billed to American taxpayers -- is steep. We lose millions of dollars every year -- $35 million in 2002 -- because the Forest Service spends far more money preparing logging projects and building logging roads than the timber industry pays in return for the trees.

Rather than catering to the timber industry, the Bush administration should have fulfilled the wishes of the American public and maintained the protections of the Tongass. It would have been a priceless gift for our children -- and theirs.